In most conventional distributed systems, it is difficult to discover information about files that are located at remote locations. Many conventional systems provide vehicles for discovering such information, but the vehicles are especially cumbersome. In particular, the vehicles are time-consuming and require a large amount of traffic to be sent across the distributed system. Moreover, there is no well-known place for storing such information in many of these systems. In systems that provide such a well-known location, the load of requests to access this information is often quite large and creates complications among the processes vying to gain access to the information.
Certain conventional database systems provide mechanisms for indexing the contents contained within databases. For instance, some conventional database systems provide inverted lists that act as indexes into the databases. Other database systems provide views (i.e., virtual tables) that hold selected information from the databases. However, none of these conventional database systems have applied such a technology in a comprehensive fashion to system level objects.